The violent ride went on for so long he couldn’t estimate it: an hour? Once the noise lessened to the point where they could shout to each other, which they did just because it could be done; there actually wasn’t much to say.

“We’re in a thunderhead!”

“Yes!”

Then she pointed down with one finger. Pink blurs below. And they were descending rapidly, his eardrums aching again. Being spit out the bottom of the cloud, as hail. Pink, brown, rust, amber, umber. Ah yes — the surface of the planet, looking not very different than it ever had from the air. Descent. He and Ann had come down in the same landing vehicle, he recalled, the very first time.

Now the boat was scudding along under the cloud’s bottom, in falling hail and rain; but the helium might pull them back up into the cloud. He pushed down a likely toggle on the panel, and the boat began to descend. A pair of small toggles; manipulating them seemed to dip them forward or raise them up. Altitude adjusters. He pushed them both gently down.

They seemed to be descending. After a while it was clearer below. In fact they appeared to be over jagged ridges and mesas; that would be the Cydonia Mensa, on the mainland of Arabia Terra. Not a good place to land.

But the storm continued to carry them along, and soon they were east of Cydonia, out over the flat plains of Arabia.

Now they needed to descend soon, before they were flung out over the North Sea, which might very well be as wild and ice-filled as Chryse had been. Below lay a patchwork of fields, orchards — irrigation canals and curving streams, lined by trees. It had been raining a lot, it looked like, and there was water all over the surface of the land, in ponds, in canals, in little craters, and covering the lower parts of fields. Farmhouses clustered in little villages, only outbuildings in the fields — barns, equipment sheds. Lovely wet countryside, quite flat. Water everywhere. They were descending, but slowly. Ann’s hands were a bluish white in the dim afternoon; and so were his.

He pulled himself together, feeling very weary. The landing would be important. He pushed down the adjusters hard.

Now they were descending more swiftly. They were being blown over a line of trees, then down, rapidly over a broad field. At the far end it was inundated, brown rainwater filling the furrows. Beyond the field stood an orchard, and a water landing would be perfect anyway; but they were moving horizontally quite fast, and still perhaps ten or fifteen meters over the field. He shoved the adjusters full forward and saw the underhulls tilt down like diving dolphins, and the boat tilted as well, and then the land came right up at them, brown water, big splash, white waves winging away to both sides, and they were being dragged through muddy water until the boat skated right into a line of young trees, and stopped hard. Down the line of trees a group of kids and a man were running toward them, their mouths all perfect round O’s in their faces.

Sax and Ann struggled to a sitting position. Sax opened the cockpit shell. Brown water spilled in over the gunwale. A windy hazy day in the Arabian countryside. The water pouring in felt distinctly warm. Ann’s face was wet and her hair stood out in stiff tufts, as if she had been electrocuted. She smiled a crooked smile. “Nicely done,” she said.

PART FOURTEEN

Phoenix Lake

A gun shot, a bell rung, a choir singing counterpoint.

The third Martian revolution-was so complex and nonviolent that it was hard to see it as a revolution at all, at the time; more like a shift in a ongoing argument, a change in the tide, a punctuation of equilibrium.

The takeover of the elevator was the seed of the crisis, but then a few weeks later the Terran military came down the cable and the crisis flowered everywhere at once. On the shore of the North Sea, on a small indentation of the coast of Tempe Terra, a cluster oflanders dropped out of the sky, swaying under parachutes or shimmering down on plumes of pale fire: a whole new colony, an unauthorized incursion of immigrants. This particular group was from Kampuchea; elsewhere on the planet other landers were descending, with settlers from the Philippines, Pakistan, Australia, Japan, Venezuela, New York. The Martians did not know how to respond. They were a demilitarized society, with no idea that something like this could ever happen, with no way to defend themselves. Or so they thought.

Once again it was May a who pulled them into action, playing the wrist like Frank used to, calling everyone in the open Mars coalition and many others besides, orchestrating the general response. Come on, she said to Nadia. One more time. And so through the cities and villages the word spread, and people went down into the streets, or got on trains to Mangala.

On the coast of Tempe, the new Kampuchean settlers got out of their landers and went to the little shelters that had been dropped with them, just as the First Hundreds had two centuries before. And out of the hills came people wearing furs, and carrying bows and arrows. They had red stone eyeteeth, and their hair was tied in topknots. Here, they said to the settlers, who had bunched before one of their shelters. Let us help you. Put those guns down. We’ll show you where you are. You don’t need that kind of shelter, it’s an old design. That hill you see to the west is Perepelkin Crater. There’s already apple and cherry orchards on the apron, you can take what you need. Look, here are the plans for a disk house, that’s the best design for this coast. Then you’ll need a marina, and some fishing boats. If you let us use your harbor we’ll show you where the truffles grow. Yes, a disk house, see, a Sattelmeier disk house. It’s lovely to live out in the open air. You’ll see.

All branches of the Martian government had met in the assembly hall in Mangala, to deal with the crisis. The Free Mars majority in the senate, and the executive council, and the Global Environmental Court, all agreed that the illegal incursion of Terrans was an act of aggression the equivalent of war, which had to be responded to in kind. There were suggestions from the floor of the senate that asteroids could be directed at Terra, as bombs that would be diverted only if the immigrants returned home and the elevator went back to a system of dual supervision. It would only take one strike to have a KT event, and so on. UN diplomats on the scene pointed out that this was a sword that could cut boths ways.

In these tense days there came a knock on the door of the assembly hall in Mangala, and in walked Maya Toitovna. She said, “We want to speak.” Then she ushered in a crowd waiting outside, pushing them up onto the stage like an impatient sheepdog: first Sax and Ann, walking side by side; then Nadia and Art, Tariki and Nanao, Zeyk and Nazik, Mikhail, Vasili, Ursula and Marina, even Coyote. The ancient issei, come back to haunt the present moment, come back to take the stage and say what they thought. Maya pointed to the room’s screens, which showed images of the outside of the building; the group on the stage now extended in an unbroken line through the halls of the building out onto the big central plaza facing the sea, where some half-million people were assembled. The city streets were also stuffed with people, watching screens to see what was happening in the assembly hall. And out in Chalmers Bay there sailed a fleet of townships like a startling new archipelago, with flags and banners waving from their masts. And in every Martian city the crowds were out, the screens were on. Everyone could see everyone else.

Ann went to the podium and said quietly that the government of Mars in recent years had broken both the law and the spirit of human compassion, by forbidding immigration from Earth to Mars. The people of Mars did not want that. They needed a new government. This was a vote of no confidence. The new incursions of Tenon settlers were also illegal, and unacceptable, but understandable; the government of Mars had broken the law first. And the number of new settlers in these incursions was no greater than the number of legitimate settlers who had been illegally barred from coming by the current government. Mars, Ann said, had to be open to Tenon immigration as much as could be, given the physical constraints, for as long as the population-surge years might last. The surge years would not last much longer. Their duty now to their descendants was to get through the last of these packed years in peace. “Nothing on the table now is worth war. We have seen it, and we know.”